When Your Extended Family Isn't Into Your Adoption Education Journey - Weekend Wisdom

Question: Hi, my husband, biological daughter and I are in the process of infant adoption. We have passed our home study and have made our profile book. We are at the point where we are viewing expectant moms' profiles. My husband‘s family is very excited and ready for this new chapter in our lives, but my family, however, seems unsure. It’s been hard to communicate with my parents about adoption, and it seems like when they are ready to talk about adoption it’s when I am not in the room and they are alone with my husband. I have sent them a book called “In On It: What Adoptive Parents Want You to Know About Adoption,” but they don’t seem to want to read the book or communicate with me about it. So my question is, should I continue to foster conversations around adoption while we wait to be matched, or since it seems kind of triggering or taboo for them, should I back away and just focus on my immediate family and our journey together? My intent was to offer them support with all of the learning and education that I have gone through during this pre-adoption process, but I’m wondering if I should let them move at their own speed regarding this adoption. 

Resources

• Winning Over Reluctant Extended Family in Adoption
• My Parents Disapprove of Open Adoption – Weekend Wisdom
• How to Get Grandparents on Board with Your Adoption Plans

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Hello and welcome to Weekend Wisdom. I'm Tracy Whitney, your host for this short
practical conversation about adoption, foster care, and kinship care. Weekend Wisdom is
a second podcast from creatingafamily .org and we use these episodes to answer your
questions. So if you have a question about adoption, foster care, or raising a
relative child, send it to info @creatingafamily .org. We'll come through our extensive
resources from experts in the field, share our own experiences in parenting, and help
you find an answer that strengthens your family. Today we have a question from
Kelsey. "Hi, my husband, biological daughter, and I are in the process of infant
adoption. We have passed our home study and have made our profile book. We are at
the point where we are viewing expectant mom's profiles. My husband's family is very
excited and ready for this new chapter of our life, but my family seems unsure.
It's hard to communicate with my parents about adoption, and it seems like they are
ready to talk about adoption when I'm not in the room or when they are alone with
my husband. I sent them a book called "In On It," what adoptive parents want you
to know about adoption, but they don't seem to want to read the book or communicate
with me about it. So my question is this, should I continue to foster conversations
around adoption while we wait to be matched, or, since it seems kind of triggering
or taboo for them, should I back away and just focus on my immediate family and
our journey together? My intent was to offer them support with all of the learning
and education I've been doing through this pre -adoption process, but I'm wondering if
I should let them move at their own speed regarding this adoption. Thank you for
everything. Well, Kelsey, thank you for sharing your concerns and your questions. I
want to applaud you first for a proactive stance on bringing your family into these
conversations about adoption and for being open and willing to share your journey
with them. I think this degree of openness and curiosity bodes pretty well for you
in the future of the parenting experiences you will face in this adoption. I wonder
though if you could employ some of that same curiosity and openness to this
situation with your parents. You say that it's been hard to communicate with them
and that it seems almost triggering or taboo for them. Maybe you could ask them
about that. Ask them questions like how they're feeling about your adoption process
or how they're feeling about what they've learned from you so far. Maybe you could
ask them what they've observed in you and your husband as you've been working
together to get ready for this baby. I think if you can try to approach them with
the assumption of good intent and a curiosity about where they're at, and then
receiving whatever you hear back from them as unconditionally and non -judgmentally as
you can, you might start to find the foundation being built that helps you move
forward from there. I think it's really important to hold on to that posture of
assuming positive intent for both sides of your family. A specific example might be
trying not to assume that your parents are unsure about this adoption.
They may just have different levels of experience with adoption. They may have
different concerns or pre -existing knowledge about adoption that they haven't
verbalized with you yet. They may also have a different understanding of boundaries
between you and them, especially now that you've gone off to form your own family.
They may not be sure what's appropriate to say or do, what expected responses might
be, and if they're unfamiliar or sure about how these changes may impact you and
your immediate family or your extended family. They may just be trying to think
through some of that and navigating that gently and tenderly. In other words,
try not to assume that what you are maybe perceiving as disinterest in your learning
journey as disinterest in the adoption itself. Try to kind of keep those things
separate if you can. It could be that they see your kind of forays into education
as unnecessary since you're planning to adopt a newborn. For example, many people in
older generations will frequently kind of repeat the message that babies are clean
slates, and you might even hear them say things like, "Oh, they're so young, they
won't remember anything." And while you may know that that is true because of the
education you've been embarking on so far, they may not know that's true. And so I
think it's time to ask yourself if this is a good time for a conversation. Again,
assuming positive intent, a posture of curiosity, a posture of openness, these are
all things that you can do on your side of things to figure out where they're at
with your learning process and where they might be at with their learning process or
if they're even interested in the learning process and maybe they just want to get
to the grandparenting side of things. Assume that they want the best for you, assume
that they want the best for your family and try to just kind of build the
conversations from there. To get that conversational ball rolling, if and when you
decide it's time for a conversation about it, you could ask them like what kind of
grandparent do you want to be? Or ask them how they remember their relationship with
their grandparents or your relationship with your grandparents. Ask them how you can
support them in becoming the kind of grandparents they want to be. You could also
kind of maybe dig a little deeper and ask them how they feel about building a
family by adoption. Regardless of the specific questions that you ask, and again,
those are just kind of conversation starters, regardless of--
questions about being a mom for the first time and maybe your mom is the one that
you turned to and so not being able to turn to her right now may feel scary for
you but it may also make her question what her role and where her place is because
this is a different way of building a family than she's familiar with. No matter
what path you choose to work out these questions between you and your parents.
Try not to compare your husband's parents' reaction to all of this against your
parents' reactions to all of this. They are two separate families with two separate
worlds of experience behind them, two separate histories behind them, and actually if
both sets of grandparents are alive and well, then there's four sets of life
experiences that they're bringing to the table. And it's hard to navigate all of
that. But again, going back to that, assuming the best intent and employing curiosity
and compassion in the conversations, I think we'll go a really long way towards
helping you meet them where they're at and then offer them suggestions for how to
meet you where you and your husband are at. So thanks for your question, Kelsey,
and we wish you the very best of luck in the matching process and in welcoming a
new baby home to both sides of your family. If you found today's tips helpful,
please go to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a rating or a
review. When you do that, it helps us raise awareness of the creating a family .org
resources, and then that helps us strengthen more families with the good information
that we are able to offer. Thanks for listening and have a great day.